It’s amazing how quickly an idea can come together.

Earlier this year, I did a course in Commercial Urban Agriculture with Will Allen at Growing Power in Milwaukee. One three-day weekend a month for five months, I left my family in Washington DC and flew to Wisconsin to learn from the master how to grow food in a city.

I came to the CUA program primarily to pursue an idea I was working on to develop a series of sustainable rooftop farms, particularly in poor neighborhoods, in and around the nation’s capital. (Still something I’m slowly pursuing, if anyone’s interested in talking about it — that means you, real estate owners!) A related project — designing and manufacturing a modular urban composter/planter –  was also on my mind, especially as the engineering challenges of developing an affordable, light, leak-proof, rat-proof, odor-free composting unit for city-dwellers  became clearer.

My enthusiasm was pretty low when I flew into Milwaukee for our March session, the middle of my program. The February “snowmageddon” that enveloped DC — my older kids were off school for two full weeks! — significantly slowed progress on the productive rooftops idea. It turns out building owners don’t like to talk about putting half-a-foot of soil on their roofs when those same roofs are already covered in three-plus feet of snow. So on Friday, when it came time for breakout sessions, I decided to ride along on a compostables pickup run, with only a vague sense of it being applicable to my new venture. Barely 24 hours later, I had the basic model for Compost Cab fleshed out, a brief presentation put together, and the URL www.compostcab.com registered. I’ve been working on making Compost Cab a reality for about 4 1/2 months now. But the idea? It came together in a day.